Nixos, meaning to try Gnuix but I got projects to finish!

started with the classics, moved to Arch, then now I’m moving to nixos.

I’m just starting to rebuild my home server in NixOS… mainly because I do things on my server only once in a while and things are breaking and I forget where stuff is.

Like I discovered fail to ban stopped working some time ago, and I’ve been running raw since then.

With Nix I plan to manage both os and containers in one go, so that I can have the whole system in a couple of files

debian with mate

I am using Unix/Linux for over thirty years now, and the older I get, the more I like it simple.

Debian with Arch in a VM, and Guix as extra package manager on top of both for programming projects. I use Debian for stable stuff and Arch for new stuff.

Stumpwm as manual tiling window manager, or i3wm, or Sway if the first is not available. Somtimes GNOME.

Emacs with language server (lsp-mode) for programming. Vim frequently at work for embedded tasks.

Gollum wiki or Zim wiki for knowledge management.

GNOME OS

it’s technically not for everyday use, but it has been simple and trouble free for me.

Debian.

It’s pretty great for desktop stuff these days. Basically Ubuntu minus the shit. Any desktop you want, it’s got live installers now (several different ones with different desktops), it’s got nonfree firmware on the disc, they’ve really upped their game.

(And if the recent systemd stuff skeeves you out, you can toss out systemd, even. It’s not for the faint of heart though.)

– Frost

Arch on my personal machines, Debian on my servers.

Arch but it is a pain in the ass to update. 20 years here. Tried a million distros, but never Slackware or Gentoo for some reason.

Debian. I like my computer to work.

Debian on everything (well except the router is on OpenWrt).

First installed Debian more than 25 years ago. Tried some other stuff, Debian is still best for me.

Debian.

I’ve been using Linux for more than 20+

First distro: Slackware, then Debian for many years, finally Fedora, since 2014, very happy user.

What I like in Fedora: the 6 months release provides bleeding edge experience without compromising stability.

Debian Trixie headless on my router/server raspberry pi and NixOs on my laptop.

However I’m planning to switch from Nix this summer since one of the maintainers of NixOs is the one which added age verification to systemd, still haven’t decided on which Os I’ll switch to probably Devuan os but may give Alpine a shot since it’s more stable than Arch btw, so I’ll just be ricing and distro hopping this summer until I pick my new favorite again.

On my new laptop, I wanted to try something less “Cannonical”-y too, after many years of using Ubuntu. I already used Manjaro KDE on my desktop and I kinda liked it. So that, I decided to install Arch and maybe copy some configs from Manjaro, if needed. Well, at first glance, it was awesome. Fast, fully configurable system, that is fully mine. Alas, that euphoria didn’t last long: very soon some fundamental problems occured. Here I should specify that I’m using my laptop for live musical performance. And I focus on some specific things that other users might not need to.

1. Wine - couldn’t make it work with 32bit apps and VST plugins. That’s really important to me, because some of those don’t have any native replacements. Whatever I tried, Wine just refused to create a 32bit prefix.
2. At some point, several (lots of) important LV2 plugins stopped showing their GUIs. They kept working in “generic GUI” mode, but for things like equalizers having a good visualization is crucial.
3. KDE+pipewire+wayland is the worst setup for live performance ever. When you move your mouse around taskbar, it creates video-streams (to draw thumbnails) that make audio graph massively crackle.
4. Really bad performance with several soundcards. SOme cards just refused to work together in one graph, turning the sound into the ocean of xruns. And that possibility of several soundcards was the reason why wanted to switch from JACK to pipewire in the first place.
5. No possibility to have pipewire-jack and pipewire-jack-client packages installed simultaneously.
6. LADISH and Claudia - they’re quite tricky obsolete pieces of software that I use. These are really handy for making large complicated audio systems. Alternatively I tried raysession, but it didn’t work well too (didn’t restore connections).

This list could have been longer, but I will probably stop here. After a month of struggling I switched back to Ubuntu Mate 24.04. And what can I say… It works fine. It’s a bit tougher than Arch, but not much; and at the end - not a single issue of listed above. And Ubuntu has custom lowlatency kernel that helps with realtime audio applications. And it’s still Linux after all - I can easily do whatever I want - like, uninstall Snap. Some packages are too old - that’s acceptable for an LTS release; if I need something up-to-date, I can just build it from source. Also I notice the same issues on my Manjaro desktop, but it’s not so crucial there, as I primarily use desktop for gaming and video montage. But still, considering to return to Ubuntu on it too.

What I want to say is that maybe Ubuntu is not so bad, really. Cutting off some unneeded things can turn it into a good OS.

If you have been using Linux for +10 years, what are you using now?

I distro-hopped every few years until about 2015. Since then I’ve been trending toward Debian for everything.